Q & A with Julie Bindel

By Frances Reed | Last updated: 11:32, 28/11/2011

http://oxfordstudent.com/2011/11/28/q-a-with-julie-bindel/

You say oppose transgender surgery because as a feminist you believe that gender is socially and not biologically constructed, how then can you describe yourself as a lesbian, which is a gender based sexual orientation?

The reason why I oppose the diagnosis of transexualism is that there is no such thing as an essential man or an essential woman. The idea that you can actually use surgery to make you become something that is a social construct is ridiculous. For example there are white people who feel they have a black identity or gentiles who feel they have a Jewish identity. If they then affected the stereotypical appearance and behavior of a black person or Jewish person and went along to a social grouping fighting their oppression they wouldn't be accepted. They would be told they hadn't had the life experience of being black or being Jewish under racism or anti-Semitism. No one who is political and fighting against racism would accept that white person blacking themself up and saying 'this is me I am really black I was born in the wrong skin'. Race is a social construct too, its all a social construct, in that case how can there be a male brain and a female brain? How can you be born predisposed to liking pink and Barbie dolls when what feminists say is that is imposed upon us? The last thing that we want therefore is people born male turning that completely on its head and saying 'oh yes there is something inherent about being female where we like pink and we like Barbie dolls and we want to teeter around on high heels'. It flies in the face of feminist notion that feminized behavior and masculinized behavior is a social construct.

This was a self justifying, paranoid rant. More sad than pathetic.

This line sums it up for me:

QuoteI don't mean it by force, I mean just by shaking them and saying 'you are the problem, you and your group of allies are the problem' I don't want to appease you and I don't want to metaphorically suck your dick, I just want to tell you that you're the problem.

You'd think people could grasp the difference between gender roles and gender identities by now. One is indeed constructed, one is not.
Not even a recent discovery...

You'd think that someone in acedemia would pick her up on her preposterus claims about genetics.

She has decided that current genetic theory doesn't suit her, so she decrees that it's false.

But as I said, a paranoid rant. The poor woman has other problems and seems to want to avoid these by launching silly attacks. As always happens with this sort of behaviour, she ends up making a fool of herself. It's only the closed shop of accedemia that lacks the integrity to even quietly point out to her that she's being so silly. Why would they? If they criticise her, she might criticise them. Then the farce of university acedemia might be oped up to everyone.